Jennifer V. Evans

My undergraduate teaching revolves around contemporary German and European history, and I also teach transnational histories of love, hate, sexuality, and everyday life. I also teach about the longue durée history of authoritarianism, populism, and fascism. At the graduate level, I focus on critical theory and interdisciplinary research methods in addition to historiography. My main research interests lie in the history of sexuality and visual culture, especially the role of photography and social media as agents of historical meaning.

My publications reflect these same interests in thinking conceptually as well as historically. My first book Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) is a cultural history of reconstruction and traces the rebirth of the city’s various subcultures in the aftermath of World War II. I have written book chapters and articles on same-sex sexuality in post-1945 Germany and co-edited a book with Matt Cook (Birkbeck) entitled Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe Since 1945 (Continuum, 2013). Another in German, on the historiography surrounding homosexuality, was edited together with Florian Mildenburger, Jakob Pastötter, and Rüdiger Lautmann, entitled Was ist Homosexualität? (Männerschwarm, 2013). Current projects a monograph on social media and Holocaust memory and I am also exploring the role of erotic photography as a claim to desire, personhood, and sexual freedom in the era before AIDS.

I am happy to supervise MA and PhD with wide-ranging interests in the social and cultural history of 20th and 21st century Germany. I am particularly interested in theoretically informed approaches to the history of the body, gender, and sexuality, visual culture, public memory, and the everyday.

Research Interests

contemporary Germany and East Central Europe

history of sexuality; visual culture, including social media and photography; social and cultural theory

historical subjectivity; the spatial, visual, and now digital turns; “other victims” of the Holocaust; the Sexual Revolution

Honours and Awards

2017 SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Libraries, Sound, and Queer Kinship”
2016 Elected Member of Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Experts
2015 University Research Achievement Award
2013-15 SSHRC Insight Grant, “Photography and the Sexual Revolution”
2011 SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Hate 2.0: Combating Right-Wing Extremism in the Age of Social Technology” Research Blog: http://www.hate2point0.com).
2003-06 SSHRC Standard Research Grant, “The Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi and Postwar Germany”.
2003 Carleton University Students Association Teaching Award
2002 SSRC Berlin Program Postdoctoral Fellowship

Select Publications

Books:

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape. Co-written with Erica Fagen and Meghan Lundrigan. (Bloomsbury, in preparation).

The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and 20th Century German History. Edited together with Paul Betts and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Berghahn Books, December 2017).

Queering German History, Special Issue of German History, (September 2016).